Frumpy Middle-aged Mom: Looking for me? I won’t be covered with dust from Coachella

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Crowd dance at the Do Lab stage during Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. on Sunday, April 15, 2018. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

I want to talk to you about Coachella, and I have plenty of time to do that because I’m not there.

As many of you know, there’s a big honking music festival going on right now out in the desert near Palm Springs, and it attracts about 1.2 zillion young people every year because, well, because there are 1.2 zillion young people going, all with hormones raging.

Oh, yeah, and Beyoncé. And other famed musicians who the ticket holders never actually get to see as more than a small dot of light, because they’ll be standing four miles from the stage. (*See part about 1.2 zillion attendees.) And less famous artists at smaller stages, who are often the best.

The Coachella Valley Art and Music Festival is now such a big deal that a quarter of a million people attend every year. Tickets sell out six months in advance, often in less than an hour, even though they cost more than my new set of tires.

I have never wanted to go.

I’m actually a big fan of outdoor music festivals. I go to them regularly. In fact, I discovered some of my favorite artists when they were performing at the less-than-popular 1 p.m. opening gig at several outdoor events.

I also love the desert, in fact I have a house and 20 acres in Joshua Tree, not that far away. And cool art installations like the ones the promoters install every year.

However, as I get older, I don’t find dust storms, standing in line, squinting and common bathroooms to be nearly as alluring as they used to be.

Festival goers make their way across the field after Cardi B’s set at the Coachella Stage during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA., Sunday, April 15, 2018. (Staff photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

When I was younger, I would eagerly look for opportunities to pay $500 for a ticket to an event that offered me the chance to stand in line to use a common john. The rich aromas that wafted from it brought bacon-wrapped brussels sprouts to mind.

I wanted the exercise involved in hiking five miles to my overpriced lodging. It was like staying at a yoga retreat. Sleeping on the floor of a hotel room with 37 other people, walking for miles and miles, elbowing others aside to get through the crowd, admiring the cool clothes of people infinitely hipper than I would ever be. I lived for this.

But you reach a certain age where no amount of desert dust will cover the wrinkles on your face. You admit to yourself that you’ll never actually be cool. In fact, you keep saying the word “cool” when it’s not a cool word anymore. You should be saying things are “dope,” when in fact to you that just means they’re stupid. And you don’t really want to look like the elderly chaperone at a rave.

Some of you readers have urged me to go to Coachella anyway, with 250,000 others, because you go every year with your young adult kids. All I can say is, “More power to you.” And “Get a sunburn for me.”

The first Coachella festival was held in 1999 at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, which is actually east of Palm Springs in an area otherwise most famous for its date palms. It got its name because it’s located in the Coachella Valley, which is one of the hottest, driest places in the United States. Imagine desert winds sucking all the moisture from your body for days. There, you’ve got it.

When you live in Southern California, it’s hard not to hear about Coachella, because sometimes it seems like everyone under the age of 30 is there in April. But I was surprised to meet an ethnomusicology professor from Georgia the other day who wasn’t familiar with it.

“I heard about some music festival in the desert that I should avoid when I go to visit Palm Springs, because the hotels will be sold out,” is what he told me.

Um, yeah. That is correct.

Jeniya Penrod, 34, of Miami, poses inside Edoardo Tresoldi’s wire-mesh sculpture Etherea as the sun sets during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio on Saturday, April 14, 2018. (Photo by Kevin Sullivan, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Now, I definitely want to recommend outdoor festivals. You have a chance to check out artists who may become your favorites. I first saw Ani DeFranco and Ben Harper in afternoon sets outdoors. And you don’t have to deal with annoying distortion, because the sound isn’t bouncing off basketball scoreboards before it gets to you. If people are smoking, it’s not usually blowing in your face. I’m sorry they tore down Irvine Meadows (thank the Irvine City Council and the Irvine Company for that one.)

And who knows? Maybe someday I’ll win the lottery and get myself flown into Coachella by private plane, then crash in one of those $8,500 glamping tents, and see what all the fuss is about.

Marla Jo Fisher was a workaholic hard news reporter before she adopted two children from foster care at age 46, picked up a scruffy dog along the way and somehow managed to keep them all alive, at least so far. She now writes the Frumpy Middle-Age Mom humor column that appears in the Orange County Register weekly. Due to her status as the cheapest person alive, she also writes about deals and bargains for the Register, including her Cheapo Travel column which also runs in newspapers around the country. When she's not having a nervous breakdown, she's usually traveling somewhere cheaply and writing about it.